New gTLD Domain Registrations Pass The 250,000 Mark

According to ntldstats.com, the number of new gTLD domain name registration has now passed the 250,000 mark.

.Guru is still leading the pack with almost 45,000 registrations but .Photography is closing in passing 28,000 registrations.

.Tips and .Today have about the same amount of registrations which are quickly approaching 15,000 each.

.Technology and .Director each have just over 10,000 registrations.

Of all fully launched new gTLD’s .Tattoo seems to have the least with just over 1,200 registrations.

.Tattoo is one of only a couple of new gTLD’s that are not available for registration on Godaddy.com.

.Tattoo and .Sexy are offered by Frank Schilling Uniregistry.

The largest registrar for .Tattoo is Enom with 27% of the registrations followed by Name.com at over 15% both are owned by Demand Media, Inc. meaning that those 2 registrars are responsible for almost half of all .Tattoo registrations.

The other new gTLD launched by Uniregistry, is .Sexy which topped 5,000 registrations.

The retail registrar arm of Uniregistry, Uniregistrar.com is expected to launch sometime today which should help drive quite a few more registrations.

Godaddy.com has the highest number of new gTLD registrations and its market share of the new G’s is holding steady at just under 40%.

At 250,000 domain registrations its worth pointing out it’s still a 1/4 of the number of domain names registered under the .mobi extension, less than 10% of what .Biz has registered, less than 5% of the number of .info registrations and is still less than the number of domain names .Asia has registered.

(All number include the up to 100 domain names each registry is allowed to reserve for its own use).

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which owns around 80K domain names and whose retail site is at MostWantedDomains.com. Michael is also a Director of RightoftheDot.com which is a consultant in the new gTLD space and a broker of super premium domains. Michael Is also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest at #Internetofficial

I agree that longer-term timeframes provide a clearer picture of trends. My point was merely that 250k regs amongst all the new TLDs which have launched to date is peanuts compared to the number of registrations in .COM/.Net. Note that on weekends oftentimes there will be a net loss in registrations but over a month’s time generally the .COM registration figures are increasing. We’ll see if the tendency over the last decade of annual increases in .COM/.Net registrations changes as a result of the new TLDs. I doubt it.

Well,the whole process on these new TLD’s is B.S
I pre registered 20 .company @ 3 different registers,and paid the pre payments weeks ago…and you know what? It looks like I’ll get one…maybe.So 60 registrations from 3 registrars and maybe one,as of today.MICHAEL BERKINS,mate you got GOLD.COMPANY last night,by coming in and paying more,that was the first one I ordered a couple of months ago,this is of cause not your fault,but us little guys trying to squeeze a living out of this business,haven’t got a chance in hell.Taking money from God knows how many people,and then selling it at a higher price boarders on criminal.FIRST COME,FIRST SERVED,should be mandatory.
If I sold a house,and took 10,000 deposits,and then sold to some one for a higher price,at least in Australia,I’d be in jail real quick,we call it “guzumping”. Anyway rant over,But I’m cancelling ALL further pre regs and they can jam them where the sun doesn’t shine.

There is no market yet for new G’s today (March 16th 2014) – no market at all – in fact this is still that magic moment where many of the best are just sitting there, or yet to come out. We see people picking them up each day like pennies from heaven. It’s crazy.. The deals are too-good. So good that people talk themselves out of it like Florida Swamp land in Miami in 1920 .. In a few short years Flagler’s trains will be arriving and people will be pumping the swamp, filling it and selling it for a million an acre. This is so much like the .com boom which began 1995, albeit on a more muted scale with only insiders in the know and the general public largely unaware due to poor execution on the part of established registrars. If I have one regret its that there is just one of me. I’d love to have 7 extra hours in the day to scoop some of the bargains and may yet begin if I have time once we’re done with the registrar. Mike Berkens sees it and I see him participating. He may wind up winning like Charlie Sheen, if he can navigate between the raindrops and pick up a bunch of gems before the masses catch on. I’m honestly shocked at how ‘deer in the headlights’ many of the people I count as smart have been in this. Mark this post/comment thread as a dateline and google it in a few years. To see that I called it.

frank, who are you trying to kid? “pennies from heaven”? maybe in your world pennies are 300 dollars plus. lets be real, only people with a lot of disposable income can afford to pick up a decent number of these domains. Just look at mike, he is dropping 3k per name sometimes. Premium domains are like 390 and thats last day EAP. you are basically stuck paying some kind of EAP, even the lowest EAP is 150… which is the only chance you have to get a lot of domains before the pre-orders get them. if you buy just 3 premiums on last day EAP you’re already over 1k. maybe in your world everyone is rich with 10k to risk on new “opportunities” but not in mine or most others. and domains people are buying after EAP, after the pre-orders and if they can’t afford premiums…they’re buying crap.

the rich get richer (if it pans out) as always!

mike also owns goldcompany.com…since 2003 maybe? i wonder how many offers he gets for it and how much he thinks he”ll be able to sell gold.company for?

Question for Name Administration – per Whois I can see you own about 246k domains of which about 90% are .COM, about 9% .Net and less than one percent other (mostly .ORG). Out of 246k domains I found only one .INFO, zero .CO, zero .ME, zero .BIZ, zero .TV Why no interest in any of these other extensions some of which have existed for years and which occasionally appear on DNJournal reports? I understand these extensions generally don’t have type-in traffic and are illiquid relative to .COM. But if the .COM namespace is so crowded shouldn’t these other extensions offer at least limited investment opportunities as much so as the new TLDs?

The process of pre-orders is not BS its picking your spots and paying up sometimes for something really good.

All domain rollouts to date except for Mr. Schilling unregistry have had landrush periods which for any extra fees usually in the $150-$200 range you can jump the cue and get a domain in landrush but even so many times other have done the same and you wind up just being in an auction for the $200 you just paid to get into Landrush.

Donuts and Rightside are doing the Early Access Program which is in a way like a landush where you can pay extra to get registered on the 1 day 2nd day and up to 5th day of availability before general availability.

You pick the price your willing to pay and the level your willing to go in at

@cmac .. $300 a name once, maybe, if it’s Great.sexy or wow.ventures not $300 a year.. There are deals between the raindrops though. I’m not saying back up the truck on overpriced crap, I have always said, “buy the good ones in low, fixed renewal price registries, at registration price”.

@Cindy .. this is really me. Perhaps it’s a character flaw but I don’t have the ability to talk my own book if I don’t truly believe it, so you need to decide whether my views are right or wrong, and then act in your own best interest. The days of the corresponding .com working for ‘everything’ are over. I mean they are still alive in this moment, but the you are looking at the light from a dead star if you think you can slap a com on everything and its viable forever. When the last new G rolls in GA behavior will begin changing. That is a new reality. .COM doesn’t go away (no single string will be stronger unless Google does a good job with .Web) but .com gets marginalized from here on out.

You say that on the one hand and on the other, you will continue to sell your 2-3 word dotcom’s for $15K…

I won’t speak in absolutes because there will be some winners in the gTLDs like sports.cars and the other obvious word combos but deep down we all know 99% of the gTLDs being registered right now is pure junk and money flushed down the toilet and into the registries’s hands.

“The days of the corresponding .com working for ‘everything’ are over.”

No, they’re not. It’s a ridiculous thing for you to say and I’m sure not even your fellow domainers/friends would say that themselves. It’s been working fine last couple of decades with some of the top sites and companies in the world using it. What doesn’t work with everything are all the new gtlds. They actually work with very little.

While I think you’re one of the best domainers out there, the marketing for these have been pretty horrible. Comparing these to .com is not how you sell these, I think it actually makes the companies and people look amateur.

@tony For years I didn’t sell but now I’m a net seller .. You’re right, none of the best ones have come out, yet.. But there are a bunch of good ones there which are growing 250,000 today, 500,000 next month.. 1 mill in 3 months then 3 mill then 7.. the new stuff is coming and growing and some of those names are displacing .com/net and CC tld alternatives.

@Cindy you are right that the marketing has been horrible. It will get better as Google, Amazon and the .brands launch. I’d like you to understand my thinking on the corresponding .com thing. It works right now (in this moment) but what makes people pay 10,000 or 100k or 1mil for a name is that they think it will be worth more tomorrow, and they perceive a need to lord over their competitors/peers with the top-level, meaningful brand, website, email address. In this changing new world there are lots of “viable” alternates coming (not here yet). In a world where 9 out of 10 people use a com, .com stays strong.. But this has all just begun.. In 10 years, maybe 5 out of 10 are on .com.. then in 15 years all of the biggest will be on a .brand extension and only companies that can’t afford to keep-up will keep the .com or perhaps redirect to something .fresh to emulate the .brands. There are going to be thousands of small sites, some which will get BIG.. and there will not be the same hunger to revert to the .com when .brand extensions grow and show us there are safe alternatives to .com. Then there is going to be round 2 and 3.. You and other people on this forum lurking, who will say “I’m going to try my hand at getting one of these things”. So this all comes back to my point that people pay millions for great .com’s because they expect the price to go up, and because there is no viable alternative.. At some point owning a .com is going to look more like leasing real estate than buying it. At some point .com is not going to appear more valuable tomorrow. The uncertainty of a diminishing lease has shown itself to work poorly in real estate. Before this process I thought .com would only go up forever. Now that brands, google, amazon, and thousands of others are coming I don’t think that’s the case anymore. In inflation adjusted terms .com values are at or near their high water mark and in time the corresponding use (it working for everything) will diminish as well. Perhaps in the farther future .com will have a resurgence one day as a nostalgia play but a lot has to happen between here and there.

“So this all comes back to my point that people pay millions for great .com’s because they expect the price to go up, and because there is no viable alternative.”

People also pay $69 to a few thousand for good .coms on the auctions everyday. Domainers, who will turn those purchases into profit and businesses who will use them.

“then in 15 years all of the biggest will be on a .brand extension and only companies that can’t afford to keep-up will keep the .com or perhaps redirect to something .fresh to emulate the .brands.”

All the biggest businesses use a working .com. It isn’t broke, it works. You really think companies are going to throw away what works and all the marketing dollars they put into it for what? There is no reason, there is no benefit.

@frank, i have been checking a lot of prices and whois for what i consider great keywords and 90% of the time they have a $240 premium renewal rate, which sucks for anyone with a modest budget and has to hold them for a number of years in order to sell for a good profit. the good ones also seem to get snapped up early where people are paying $1200-$400, so if you wait for the regular premium price, you lose out. domainers who need to make sales week to week to pay for renewals are basically priced out of this.

i’ve only bought 2 of these domains so far. one has a premium renewal rate of close to $100 and the other is a regular rate of $42 or something close to that. I can renew 5 .com’s for that $42 though..

@Cindy, RE: “All the biggest businesses use a working .com. It isn’t broke, it works. You really think companies are going to throw away what works and all the marketing dollars they put into it for what? There is no reason, there is no benefit.”

why does everyone continue to talk like new businesses will cease to exist.. they’re all established now. all most of you guys ever talk about are “well company A wont change their website”

are people going to stop being born?

the big businesses of 20 years from now dont even exist and some of the ones that exist now will be merged, no longer exist, or remain in existence using their O.G. dotCOM domain.. (that stands for original geek, not gangster, silly)

its a mixed bag. not completely one way or the other. one thing that is a pipe dream tho is saying .COM as a whole will continue to go up in value now with 1,000+ TLD’s in existence…

peoplearenotgonnauselongtailwhentheycanregister.anything and it sounds more intuitive and shorter.

but nah, lets just all pat each other on the back, shed a nostalgic tear or two and hang onto the past when only a few categories of .weird existed (like .mobi, .travel, .info, .asia) and lets use that as an example why an infinite amount of TLD’s in EVERY category will never ever ever stand to normalize these in a way .mobi and their 9 friends couldnt.

Here are just some of the ways that the 2014 new GTLD debacle is nothing like 1995.

1995
Few people know about domains
Pricing is fixed and known
Renewal prices are clear and the same for all domains
The registration process is a bit complicated, but the same for everyone
There is ONE extension that anyone cares about
There is the genuine, provable prospect of getting significant type-in traffic for hand-registered commercial terms
A secondary market is developing and sales are cementing the value of .com generics
There is no incumbent to push out i.e. unregistered .com names don’t have to contend with any other extensions to be “the best” choice available
Most everyone trying to make money from domains is broadly on the “same” side. There is just one registry, which is not being run on a squeeze-the-last-dime-out-of-every-transaction basis.
Apart from a few “dirty words” and a handful of other terms associated with the infrastructure of the internet, no domains were held back – everything was there to register on a first come, first served basis.
The vast majority of COMPANIES did not have a domain name, and it became ever clearer that they needed one.
The main growth of the Web still lay ahead in developed markets

2014
There are tens of thousands of people loosely in the “domain industry” (even though many are wannabees with a credit card and not much of a clue)
Pricing is a crapshoot, different from extension to extension and day to day
Renewal prices are all over the shop
Registration processes vary from registrar to registrar. Some don’t have live Whois, and accept “registrations” for reserved names or for names that they don’t have a realistic chance of getting, thus tying up resources and cash
There is ONE extension that anyone cares about
There are thousands of competing extensions clamouring for attention, each claiming to be the “new big thing” and each with its own rules, regulations, peculiarities, pricing, registration process
There is very very very little chance of getting meaningful amounts of typein traffic
A strong secondary domain market already exists, and in the early running it has largely shrugged at new GTLD.
There is an 80,000 pound incumbent to push out: .com
There are very distinct factions in the race to make money. Registry interests are not necessarily lined up with registrar interests, and registrant interests are different again.
Many new GTLD have reserved thousands or tens of thousands of the most commercially relevant names, for later release (via auctions, premium partner programs and the like)
The vast majority of COMPANIES already have a domain name and an established web presence.
Web penetration is pretty much at saturation point in developed markets

Did anyone spot the single huge similarity between 1995 and 2014? Here it is again…
There is ONE extension that anyone cares about

its a good post but all it really says is that the rug is pulled out from under “domainers” and now the registries are the new domainers. seems like the natural progression of things on the interspace.. first the lil guy can make money then the big dudes with cash move in and change the game in a top down approach…so whats new.

but yea, its like “collectors items”… most rare n’ valuable collectors items became that way because it happened naturally and not many people expected it.. in the mid-late 90’s i remember my mom telling me the internet was a fad kinda like a new popular video game and that me being “addicted to the internet” was a “phase.” lots of people thought this sorta stuff and from the distance they were viewing from can anyone really blame them? there was nothing really on here besides Rocketmail, Hotmail, eBay, Amazon, Usenet, IRC and FTP servers you could download free stuff from (if you had a day n’ a half and your internet stayed connected)

its when you start advertising domains as collectors items (i.e. “hey these will be valuable some day”) it isnt the same as when something became naturally valuable because not many people expected them to… so these items (domains) get thrown away, dropped, forgotten about, etc.. and end up in the hands of a few eccentric geeks.. some who knew this internet place wasnt going away, some ended up with them by coincidence. the point is it wasnt advertised anywhere as “HAY THESE WILL BE VALUABLE EVENTUALLY!” get your special limited edition collectors item domains TODAY!

i get it, everyone here gets it if they take the time to think about it.

but some of you guys are ridiculous if you dont think end users and the businesses of tomorrow wont use gTLD with THIS many options.. options in EVERY CATEGORY. its already been happening the last several years..people making due with what is available, using bastardized country codes and shitty desperate “domain hacks.” well, now the REAL domain hacks are here.

but “domainers” sitting here in 2014 looking for up-to-the-second updates watching things soooo closely, trying not to blink… when 2 weeks go by they pull out the charts and graphs saying SEE NOBODY IS INTERESTED THERE ARE NO AFTERMARKET SALES HA! HA! HA!

well der der duh. the “market” is flooded and it will be for a long time or forever. plenty of older traditional domainers WOULD be registering these if it was $8.95 flat rate and nothing was held back. so what we have here is that many people are BITTER AS HELL they cant do this and that its being ran as a top-down approach with many registries acting like domainers, squeezing what they can out of people. cry me a river.. shit has changed again.

i knew domains would be valuable in the 90’s but didn’t do much at the time about it. i would spend hours searching networksolutions for good domains to register in 1998 but i couldn’t find anything. by that time most of the good stuff was already taken and the smart people were already wise to drops and how they worked. emailed hundreds of peole but most wouldn’t respond or wanted $100,000. So not that much has changed really..

BUT the thing about .com is that anything works with it. with specialized tlds you’ve got maybe 1000 or so combos that work, many of which are reserved so the end user will have to pony up four or five figures for them. this same amount can often buy the .com. then you can add on another couple thousand for companies who’s names work with the tld. beyond that you are just using the tlds as traditional tlds which defeats the whole point of them.

heh, well then eventually the registries or whoever is holding these will sell for $1,000 less than the .COM.. if that doesnt work they’ll do $500 less than that until they find the “magic price point.”

your statement actually gives gTLD value or means .COM, as frank noted, has reached a high water mark and will stay the same or begin to decline as a whole.

i do question why people as rich as frank shilling would want to be involved with something like this.. there are a lot of unknowns how this will play out. one would assume you’d just want to retire on a beach and live life at this point.

unless… you really enjoy the process of this whole thing, the bumps in the road, watching how things will play out, playing a part in that… and REALLY actually believing what you’re doing will work out.. a.k.a. putting your money where your mouth is.

on the other handretiring on a beach indefinitely sounds boring. thats what extended vacations are for.. in the meantime you gotta do something, i guess… theres value in sticking to what you know. gTLD will eventually be used pretty often.. but repeating history in the way .COM did, where the small guy who got free domains in 1994 gets $350,000 for it 10 years later… hmmmmm yeah i dunno

i’m sure frank loves a challenge. i also think people like frank got involved because they worry about these ruining their current businesses. frank used to bank from ppc but we all know how thats doing these days. judging by the article on him, franks lifestyle is quite expensive to keep up. while i doubt he needs more money he is still young and has too energy to retire. not to mention running a registry of even failed tlds like biz and mobi is good money and they can keep on applying for new tlds forever i guess, so there is always the chance of more opportunity. anyways, i’m sure its strange to frank to see other people making guesses about his life and though process.

back to the gtlds…people are way over excited about these domains. when i see people post lists of them, i have to cringe. while there are *some* good ones the majority are horrible and make no sense. i also have to laugh when i see someone who bought a new gtld and even paid EAP pricing and i own the .com and paid reg fee a couple of years ago. while you can complain that people don’t want to move forward and accept these are going to be a part of the internet you also have to accept that there are a lot of mistakes being made in whats being registered.

Great back and forth web and cmac. I think your last line hit it Cmac, domaining has become more complex and you can’t make mistakes, or big ones, we all make mistakes, but you can’t make the kind that mean you have all your budget tied up when the really good new gtlds come out. You have to be on top of it and not be passive, I agree with web that there will be few stories of “I was 21 got a couple hot new gtlds domains and 10 years later at just 31 I sold one for $350,000″ The business has changed and making all the right moves is what is needed, domain investors have to work harder than they did before.

-1- By the best names you can in low-cost, fixed-price registries, at registration price.
-2- There are good names out there that meet the criteria in #1. above, available to be mined right now. The miners will be the winners. The moaners will go home empty handed as always
-3- Many premiums are being held back, prices will drop and premiums will go out, without fanfare and with limited announcement at registration price as more and more extensions flood to market. Remain alert for those opportunities.
-4- Use a safe, reliable registrar.

Some other nuances:
–Don’t spend all your money in one place. Think before you buy (one glass of wine for inspiration, not 3)
— Experiment, you’re going to make some bad decisions. That’s the domain business.
— Don’t be too greedy on early resales if you can’t afford to carry your renewals. I made my fortune by selling too soon.